Antoine Godeau

Perhaps best known among the works of his early days is his Discours sur les œuvres de Malherbe (1629), which shows some critical power and is valuable for the history of the French prose of the seventeenth century.

Ordained priest in Paris on May 7, 1636, he was named on June 21 Bishop of Grasse by Richelieu, to whom he had dedicated his first religious composition, a poetical paraphrase of the Psalm Benedicite omnia opera Domini.

He turned his talent for versification to religious uses, his best known productions being a metrical version of the Psalms, poems on Paul the Apostle, the Assumption, Eustace, Mary Magdalen, and one of 15,000 lines on the annals of the Catholic Church.

Of this work Johann Baptist Alzog says that "although written in an attractive and popular style, it is lacking in solid worth and original research" (Manual of Universal History, I, Dublin, 1900, 33).

In the Latin translation, which appeared at Augsburg in 1774 under the title Theologia moralis ex purissimis s. Scripturæ, patrum ac conciliorum fontibus derivata, notis theologicis illustrata, the arrangement of the matter is greatly improved.